Chapter VI: The English-Speaking Peoples: Action and Reaction (2)

The course of political events was fretting the Conservatives intolerably. The agitation for the Reform Bill was taking shape. Sir Robert Peel, the member for Oxford, had introduced a Bill for the emancipation of the Roman Catholics. There was violent commotion in Oxford. Keble and Newman strenuously opposed the measure. In 1830 there was revolution in France. In England the Whigs had come into power. Newman's mind was excited in the last degree. 'The vital question,' he says, 'is this, how are we to keep the Church of England from being liberalised?' At the end of 1832 Newman and Froude went abroad together. On this journey, as he lay becalmed in the straits of Bonifacio, he wrote his immortal hymn, 'Lead, Kindly Light.' He came home assured that he had a work to do. Keble's Assize Sermon on the _National Apostasy_, preached in July 1833, on the Sunday after Newman's return to Oxford, kindled the conflagration which had been long preparing. Newman conceived the idea of the _Tracts for the Times_ as a means of expressing the feelings and propagating the opinions which deeply moved him. 'From the first,' he says, 'my battle was with liberalism. By liberalism I mean the anti-dogmatic principle. Secondly, my aim was the assertion of the visible Church with sacraments and rites and definite religious teaching on the foundation of dogma; and thirdly, the assertion of the Anglican Church as opposed to the Church of Rome.' Newman grew greatly in personal influence. His afternoon sermons at St. Mary's exerted spiritual power. They deserved so to do. Here he was at his best. All of his strength and little of his weakness shows. His insight, his subtility, his pathos, his love of souls, his marvellous play of dramatic as well as of spiritual faculty, are in evidence. Keble and Pusey were busying themselves with the historical aspects of the question. Pusey began the _Library of the Fathers_, the most elaborate literary monument of the movement. Nothing could be more amazing than the uncritical quality of the whole performance. The first check to the movement came in 1838, when the Bishop of Oxford animadverted upon the _Tracts_. Newman professed his willingness to stop them. The Bishop did not insist. Newman's own thought moved rapidly onward in the only course which was still open to it.

Newman had been bred in the deepest reverence for Scripture. In a sense that reverence never left him, though it changed its form. He saw that it was absurd to appeal to the Bible in the old way as an infallible source of doctrine. How could truth be infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible expressions? Newman's own studies in criticism, by no means profound, led him to this correct conclusion. This was the end for him of evangelical Protestantism. The recourse was then to the infallible Church. Infallible guide and authority one must have. Without these there can be no religion. To trust to reason and conscience as conveying something of the light of God is impossible. To wait in patience and to labour in fortitude for the increase of that light is unendurable. One must have certainty. There can be no certainty by the processes of the mind from within. This can come only by miraculous certification from without.

According to Newman the authority of the Church should never have been impaired in the Reformation. Or rather, in his view of that movement, this authority, for truly Christian men, had never been impaired. The intellect is aggressive, capricious, untrustworthy. Its action in religious matters is corrosive, dissolving, sceptical. 'Man's energy of intellect must be smitten hard and thrown back by infallible authority, if religion is to be saved at all.' Newman's philosophy was utterly sceptical, although, unlike most absolute philosophical sceptics, he had a deep religious experience. The most complete secularist, in his negation of religion, does not differ from Newman in his low opinion of the value of the surmises of the mind as to the transcendental meaning of life and the world. He differs from Newman only in lacking that which to Newman was the most indefeasible thing which he had at all, namely, religious experience. Newman was the child of his age, though no one ever abused more fiercely the age of which he was the child. He supposed that he believed in religion on the basis of authority. Quite the contrary, he believed in religion because he had religion or, as he says, in a magnificent passage in one of his parochial sermons, because religion had him. His scepticism forbade him to recognise that this was the basis of his belief. His diremption of human nature was absolute. The soul was of God. The mind was of the devil. He dare not trust his own intellect concerning this inestimable treasure of his experience. He dare not trust intellect at all. He knew not whither it might lead him. The mind cannot be broken to the belief of a power above it. It must have its stiff neck bent to recognise its Creator.

His whole book, _The Grammar of Assent_, 1870, is pervaded by the intensest philosophical scepticism. Scepticism supplies its motives, determines its problems, necessitates its distinctions, rules over the succession and gradation of its arguments. The whole aim of the work is to withdraw religion and the proofs of it, from the region of reason into the realm of conscience and imagination, where the arguments which reign may satisfy personal experience without alleging objective validity or being able to bear the criticism which tests it. Again, he is the perverse, unconscious child of the age which he curses. Had not Kant and Schleiermacher, Coleridge and Channing sought, does not Ritschl seek, to remove religion from the realm of metaphysics and to bring it within the realm of experience? They had, however, pursued the same end by different means. One is reminded of that saying of Gretchen concerning Mephistopheles: 'He says the same thing with the pastor, only in different words.' Newman says the same words, but means a different thing.

Assuming the reduction of religion to experience, in which Kant and Schleiermacher would have agreed, and asserting the worthlessness of mentality, which they would have denied, we are not surprised to hear Newman say that without Catholicism doubt is invincible. 'The Church's infallibility is the provision adopted by the mercy of the Creator to preserve religion in the world. Outside the Catholic Church all things tend to atheism. The Catholic Church is the one face to face antagonist, able to withstand and baffle the fierce energy of passion and the all-dissolving scepticism of the mind. I am a Catholic by virtue of my belief in God. If I should be asked why I believe in God, I should answer, because I believe in myself. I find it impossible to believe in myself, without believing also in the existence of him who lives as a personal, all-seeing, all-judging being in my conscience.' These passages are mainly taken from the _Apologia_, written long after Newman had gone over to the Roman Church. They perfectly describe the attitude of his mind toward the Anglican Church, so long as he believed this, and not the Roman, to be the true Church. He had once thought that a man could hold a position midway between the Protestantism which he repudiated and the Romanism which he still resisted. He stayed in the _via media_ so long as he could. But in 1839 he began to have doubts about the Anglican order of succession. The catholicity of Rome began to overshadow the apostolicity of Anglicanism. The Anglican formularies cannot be at variance with the teachings of the authoritative and universal Church. This is the problem which the last of the _Tracts_, _Tract Ninety_, sets itself. It is one of those which Newman wrote. One must find the sense of the Roman Church in the Thirty-Nine Articles. This tract is prefaced by an extraordinary disquisition upon reserve in the communication of religious knowledge. God's revelations of himself to mankind have always been a kind of veil. Truth is the reward of holiness. The Fathers were holy men. Therefore what the Fathers said must be true. The principle of reserve the Articles illustrate. They do not mean what they say. They were written in an uncatholic age, that is, in the age of the Reformation. They were written by Catholic men. Else how can the Church of England be now a Catholic Church? Through their reserve they were acceptable in an uncatholic age. They cannot be uncatholic in spirit, else how should they be identical in meaning with the great Catholic creeds? Then follows an exposition of every important article of the thirty-nine, an effort to interpret each in the sense of the Roman Catholic Church of to-day. Four tutors published a protest against the tract. Formal censure was passed upon it. It was now evident to Newman that his place in the leadership of the Oxford Movement was gone. From this time, the spring of 1841, he says he was on his deathbed as regards the Church of England. He withdrew to Littlemore and established a brotherhood there. In the autumn of 1843 he resigned the parochial charge of St. Mary's at Oxford. On the 9th of October 1845 he was formally admitted to the Roman Church. On the 6th of October Ernest Renan had formally severed his connexion with that Church.

It is a strange thing that in his _Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine_, written in 1845, Newman himself should have advanced substantially Hampden's contention. Here are written many things concerning the development of doctrine which commend themselves to minds conversant with the application of historical criticism to the whole dogmatic structure of the Christian ages. The purpose is with Newman entirely polemical, the issue exactly that which one would not have foreseen. Precisely because the development of doctrine is so obvious, because no historical point can be found at which the growth of doctrine ceased and the rule of faith was once for all settled, therefore an infallible authority outside of the development must have existed from the beginning, to provide a means of distinguishing true development from false. This infallible guide is, of course, the Church. It seems incredible that Newman could escape applying to the Church the same argument which he had so skilfully applied to Scripture and dogmatic history. Similar is the case with the argument of the _Grammar of Assent_. 'No man is certain of a truth who can endure the thought of its contrary.' If the reason why I cannot endure the thought of the contradictory of a belief which I have made my own, is that so to think brings me pain and darkness, this does not prove my truth. If my belief ever had its origin in reason, it must be ever refutable by reason. It is not corroborated by the fact that I do not wish to see anything that would refute it.[8] This last fact may be in the highest degree an act of arbitrariness. To make the impossibility of thinking the opposite, the test of truth, and then to shut one's eyes to those evidences which might compel one to think the opposite, is the essence of irrationality. One attains by this method indefinite assertiveness, but not certainty. Newman lived in some seclusion in the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Birmingham for many years. A few distinguished men, and a number of his followers, in all not more than a hundred and fifty, went over to the Roman Church after him. The defection was never so great as, in the first shock, it was supposed that it would be. The outward influence of Newman upon the Anglican Church then ceased. But the ideas which he put forth have certainly been of great influence in that Church to this day. Most men know the portrait of the great cardinal, the wide forehead, ploughed deep with horizontal furrows, the pale cheek, down which 'long lines of shadow slope, which years and anxious thought and suffering give.' One looks into the wonderful face of those last days--Newman lived to his ninetieth year--and wonders if he found in the infallible Church the peace which he so earnestly sought.

[Footnote 8: Fairbairn, _Catholicism, Roman and Anglican_, p. 157.]

MODERNISM

It was said that the Oxford Movement furnished the rationale of the reaction. Many causes, of course, combine to make the situation of the Roman Church and the status of religion in the Latin countries of the Continent the lamentable one that it is. That position is worst in those countries where the Roman Church has most nearly had free play. The alienation both of the intellectual and civil life from organised religion is grave. That the Roman Church occupies in England to-day a position more favourable than in almost any nation on the Continent, and better than it occupied in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is due in large measure to the general influence of the movement with which we have been dealing. The Anglican Church was at the beginning of the nineteenth century preponderantly evangelical, low-church and conscious of itself as Protestant. At the beginning of the twentieth it is dominantly ritualistic and disposed to minimise its relation to the Reformation. This resurgence of Catholic principles is another effect of the movement of which we speak. Other factors must have wrought for this result besides the body of arguments which Newman and his compeers offered. The argument itself, the mere intellectual factor, is not adequate. There is an inherent contradiction in the effort to ground in reason an authority which is to take the place of reason. Yet round and round this circle all the labours of John Henry Newman go. Cardinal Manning felt this. The victory of the Church was not to be won by argument. It is well known that Newman opposed the decree of infallibility. It cannot be said that upon this point his arguments had great weight. If one assumes that truth comes to us externally through representatives of God, and if the truth is that which they assert, then in the last analysis what they assert is truth. If one has given in to such authority because one distrusts his reason, then it is querulous to complain that the deliverances of authority do not comport with reason. There may be, of course, the greatest interest in the struggle as to the instance in which this authority is to be lodged. This interest attaches to the age-long struggle between Pope and Council. It attaches to the dramatic struggle of Döllinger, Dupanloup, Lord Acton and the rest, in 1870. Once the Church has spoken there is, for the advocate of authoritative religion, no logic but to submit.

Similarly as to the _Encyclical_ and _Syllabus of Errors_ of 1864, which forecast the present conflict concerning Modernism. The _Syllabus_ had a different atmosphere from that which any Englishman in the sixties would have given it. Had not Newman, however, made passionate warfare on the liberalism of the modern world? Was it not merely a question of degrees? Was Gladstone's attitude intelligible? The contrast of two principles in life and religion, the principles of authority and of the spirit, is being brought home to men's consciousness as it has never been before. One reads _Il Santo_ and learns concerning the death of Fogazzaro, one looks into the literature relating to Tyrrell, one sees the fate of Loisy, comparing the really majestic achievement in his works and the spirit of his _Simple Reflections_ with the _Encyclical Pascendi_, 1907. One understands why these men have done what they could to remain within the Roman Church. One recalls the attitude of Döllinger to the inauguration of the Old Catholic Movement, reflects upon the relative futility of the Old Catholic Church, and upon the position of Hyacinthe Loyson. One appreciates the feeling of these men that it is impossible, from without, to influence as they would the Church which they have loved. The present difficulty of influencing it from within seems almost insuperable. The history of Modernism as an effective contention in the world of Christian thought seems scarcely begun. The opposition to Modernism is not yet a part of the history of thought.

ROBERTSON

In no life are reflected more perfectly the spiritual conflicts of the fifth decade of the nineteenth century than in that of Frederick W. Robertson. No mind worked itself more triumphantly out of these difficulties. Descended from a family of Scottish soldiers, evangelical in piety, a student in Oxford in 1837, repelled by the Oxford Movement, he undertook his ministry under a morbid sense of responsibility. He reacted violently against his evangelicalism. He travelled abroad, read enormously, was plunged into an agony which threatened mentally to undo him. He took his charge at Brighton in 1847, still only thirty-one years old, and at once shone forth in the splendour of his genius. A martyr to disease and petty persecution, dying at thirty-seven, he yet left the impress of one of the greatest preachers whom the Church of England has produced. He left no formal literary work such as he had designed. Of his sermons we have almost none from his own manuscripts. Yet his influence is to-day almost as intense as when the sermons were delivered. It is, before all, the wealth and depth of his thought, the reality of the content of the sermons, which commands admiration. They are a classic refutation of the remark that one cannot preach theology. Out of them, even in their fragmentary state, a well-articulated system might be made. He brought to his age the living message of a man upon whom the best light of his age had shone.

PHILLIPS BROOKS

Something of the same sort may be said concerning Phillips Brooks. He inherited on his father's side the sober rationalism and the humane and secular interest of the earlier Unitarianism, on his mother's side the intensity of evangelical pietism with the Calvinistic form of thought. The conflict of these opposing tendencies in New England was at that time so great that Brooks's parents sought refuge with the low-church element in the Episcopal Church. Brooks's education at Harvard College, where he took his degree in 1855, as also at Alexandria, and still more, his reading and experience, made him sympathetic with that which, in England in those years, was called the Broad Church party. He was deeply influenced by Campbell and Maurice. Later well known in England, he was the compeer of the best spirits of his generation there. Deepened by the experience of the great war, he held in succession two pulpits of large influence, dying as Bishop of Massachusetts in 1893. There is a theological note about his preaching, as in the case of Robertson. Often it is the same note. Brooks had passed through no such crisis as had Robertson. He had flowered into the greatness of rational belief. His sermons are a contribution to the thinking of his age. We have much finished material of this kind from his own hand, and a book or two besides. His service through many years as preacher to his university was of inestimable worth. The presentation of ever-advancing thought to a great public constituency is one of the most difficult of tasks. It is also one of the most necessary. The fusion of such thoughtfulness with spiritual impulse has rarely been more perfectly achieved than in the preaching of Phillips Brooks.

THE BROAD CHURCH

We have used the phrase, the Broad Church party. Stanley had employed the adjective to describe the real character of the English Church, over against the antithesis of the Low Church and the High. The designation adhered to a group of which Stanley was himself a type. They were not bound together in a party. They had no ecclesiastical end in view. They were of a common spirit. It was not the spirit of evangelicalism. Still less was it that of the Tractarians. It was that which Robertson had manifested. It aimed to hold the faith with an open mind in all the intellectual movement of the age. Maurice should be enumerated here, with reservations. Kingsley beyond question belonged to this group. There was great ardour among them for the improvement of social conditions, a sense of the social mission of Christianity. There grew up what was called a Christian Socialist movement, which, however, never attained or sought a political standing. The Broad Church movement seemed, at one time, assured of ascendancy in the Church of England. Its aims appeared congruous with the spirit of the times. Yet Dean Fremantle esteems himself perhaps the last survivor of an illustrious company.

The men who in 1860 published the volume known as _Essays and Reviews_ would be classed with the Broad Church. In its authorship were associated seven scholars, mostly Oxford men. Some one described _Essays and Reviews_ as the _Tract Ninety_ of the Broad Church. It stirred public sentiment and brought the authors into conflict with authority in a somewhat similar way. The living antagonism of the Broad Church was surely with the Tractarians rather than with the evangelicals. Yet the most significant of the essays, those on miracles and on prophecy, touched opinions common to both these groups. Jowett, later Master of Balliol, contributed an essay on the 'Interpretation of Scripture.' It hardly belongs to Jowett's best work. Yet the controversy then precipitated may have had to do with Jowett's adherence to Platonic studies instead of his devoting himself to theology. The most decisive of the papers was that of Baden Powell on the 'Study of the Evidences of Christianity.' It was mainly a discussion of the miracle. It was radical and conclusive. The essay closes with an allusion to Darwin's _Origin of Species_, which had then just appeared. Baden Powell died shortly after its publication. The fight came on Rowland Williams's paper upon Bunson's _Biblical Researches_. It was really upon the prophecies and their use in 'Christian Evidences.' Baron Bunsen was not a great archæologist, but he brought to the attention of English readers that which was being done in Germany in this field. Williams used the archæological material to rectify the current theological notions concerning ancient history. A certain type of English mind has always shown zeal for the interpretation of prophecy. Williams's thesis, briefly put, was this: the Bible does not always give the history of the past with accuracy; it does not give the history of the future at all; prophecy means spiritual teaching, not secular prognostication. A reader of our day may naturally feel that Wilson, with his paper on the 'National Church,' made the greatest contribution. He built indeed upon Coleridge, but he had a larger horizon. He knew the arguments of the great Frenchmen of his day and of their English imitators who, in Benn's phrase, narrowed and perverted the ideal of a world-wide humanity into that of a Church founded on dogmas and administered by clericals. Wilson argued that in Jesus' teaching the basis of the religious community is ethical. The Church is but the instrument for carrying out the will of God as manifest in the moral law. The realisation of the will of God must extend beyond the limits of the Church's activity, however widely these are drawn. There arose a violent agitation. Williams and Wilson were prosecuted. The case was tried in the Court of Arches. Williams was defended by no less a person than Fitzjames Stephen. The two divines were sentenced to a year's suspension. This decision was reversed by the Lord Chancellor. Fitzjames Stephen had argued that if the men most interested in the church, namely, its clergy, are the only men who may be punished for serious discussion of the facts and truths of religion, then respect on the part of the world for the Church is at an end. By this discussion the English clergy, even if Anglo-Catholic, are in a very different position from the Roman priests, over whom encyclicals, even if not executed, are always suspended.

Similar was the issue in the case of Colenso, Bishop of Natal. Equipped mainly with Cambridge mathematics added to purest self-devotion, he had been sent out as a missionary bishop. In the process of the translation of the Pentateuch for his Zulus, he had come to reflect upon the problem which the Old Testament presents. In a manner which is altogether marvellous he worked out critical conclusions parallel to those of Old Testament scholars on the Continent. He was never really an expert, but in his main contention he was right. He adhered to his opinion despite severe pressure and was not removed from the episcopate. With such guarantees it would be strange indeed if we could not say that biblical studies entered in Great Britain, as also in America, on a development in which scholars of these nations are not behind the best scholars of the world. The trials for heresy of Robertson Smith in Edinburgh and of Dr. Briggs in New York have now little living interest. Yet biblical studies in Scotland and America were incalculably furthered by those discussions. The publication of a book like _Supernatural Religion_, 1872, illustrates a proclivity not uncommon in self-conscious liberal circles, for taking up a contention just when those who made it and have lived with it have decided to lay it down. However, the names of Hatch and Lightfoot alone, not to mention the living, are sufficient to warrant the assertions above made.

* * * * *

More than once in these chapters we have spoken of the service rendered to the progress of Christian thought by the criticism and interpretation of religion at the hands of literary men. That country and age may be esteemed fortunate in which religion occupies a place such that it compels the attention of men of genius. In the history of culture this has by no means always been the case. That these men do not always speak the language of edification is of minor consequence. What is of infinite worth is that the largest minds of the generation shall engage themselves with the topic of religion. A history of thought concerning Christianity cannot but reckon with the opinions, for example, of Carlyle, of Emerson, of Matthew Arnold--to mention only types.

CARLYLE

Carlyle has pictured for us his early home at Ecclefechan on the Border; his father, a stone mason of the highest character; his mother with her frugal, pious ways; the minister, from whom he learned Latin, 'the priestliest man I ever beheld in any ecclesiastical guise.' The picture of his mother never faded from his memory. Carlyle was destined for the Church. Such had been his mother's prayer. He took his arts course in Edinburgh. In the university, he says, 'there was much talk about progress of the species, dark ages, and the like, but the hungry young looked to their spiritual nurses and were bidden to eat the east wind.' He entered Divinity Hall, but already, in 1816, prohibitive doubts had arisen in his mind. Irving sought to help him. Irving was not the man for the task. The Christianity of the Church had become intellectually incredible to Carlyle. For a time he was acutely miserable, bordering upon despair. He has described his spiritual deliverance: 'Precisely that befel me which the Methodists call their conversion, the deliverance of their souls from the devil and the pit. There burst forth a sacred flame of joy in me.' With _Sartor Resartus_ his message to the world began. It was printed in _Fraser's Magazine_ in 1833, but not published separately until 1838. His difficulty in finding a publisher embittered him. Style had something to do with this, the newness of his message had more. Then for twenty years he poured forth his message. Never did a man carry such a pair of eyes into the great world of London or set a more peremptory mark upon its notabilities. His best work was done before 1851. His later years were darkened with much misery of body. No one can allege that he ever had a happy mind.

He was a true prophet, but, Elijah-like, he seemed to himself to be alone. His derision of the current religion seems sometimes needless. Yet even that has the grand note of sincerity. What he desired he in no small measure achieved--that his readers should be arrested and feel themselves face to face with reality. His startling intuition, his intellectual uprightness, his grasp upon things as they are, his passion for what ought to be, made a great impression upon his age. It was in itself a religious influence. Here was a mind of giant force, of sternest truthfulness. His untruths were those of exaggeration. His injustices were those of prejudice. He invested many questions of a social and moral, of a political and religious sort with a nobler meaning than they had had before. His _French Revolution_, his papers on _Chartism_, his unceasing comment on the troubled life of the years from 1830 to 1865, are of highest moment for our understanding of the growth of that social feeling in the midst of which we live and work. In his brooding sympathy with the downtrodden he was a great inaugurator of the social movement. He felt the curse of an aristocratic society, yet no one has told us with more drastic truthfulness the evils of our democratic institutions. His word was a great corrective for much 'rose-water' optimism which prevailed in his day. The note of hope is, however, often lacking. The mythology of an absentee God had faded from him. Yet the God who was clear to his mature consciousness, clear as the sun in the heavens, was a God over the world, to judge it inexorably. Again, it is not difficult to accumulate evidence in his words which looks toward pantheism; but what one may call the religious benefit of pantheism, the sense that God is in his world, Carlyle often loses.

Materialism is to-day so deeply discredited that we find it difficult to realise that sixty years ago the problem wore a different look. Carlyle was never weary of pouring out the vials of his contempt on 'mud-philosophies' and exalting the spirit as against matter. Never was a man more opposed to the idea of a godless world, in which man is his own chief end, and his sensual pleasures the main aims of his existence. His insight into the consequences of our commercialism and luxury and absorption in the outward never fails. Man is God's son, but the effort to realise that sonship in the joy and trust of a devout heart and in the humble round of daily life sometimes seems to him cant or superstition. The humble life of godliness made an unspeakable appeal to him. He had known those who lived that life. His love for them was imperishable. Yet he had so recoiled from the superstitions and hypocrisies of others, the Eternal in his majesty was so ineffable, all effort to approach him so unworthy, that almost instinctively he would call upon the man who made the effort, to desist. So magnificent, all his life long, had been his protest against the credulity and stupidity of men, against beliefs which assert the impossible and blink the facts, that, for himself, the great objects of faith were held fast to, so to say, in their naked verity, with a giant's strength. They were half-querulously denied all garment and embodiment, lest he also should be found credulous and self-deceived. From this titan labouring at the foundations of the world, this Samson pulling down temples of the Philistines on his head, this cyclops heaving hills at ships as they pass by, it seems a long way to Emerson. Yet Emerson was Carlyle's friend.

EMERSON

Arnold said in one of his American addresses: 'Besides these voices--Newman, Carlyle, Goethe--there came to us in the Oxford of my youth a voice also from this side of the Atlantic, a clear and pure voice which, for my ear at any rate, brought a strain as new and moving and unforgetable as those others. Lowell has described the apparition of Emerson to your young generation here. He was your Newman, your man of soul and genius, speaking to your bodily ears, a present object for your heart and imagination.' Then he quotes as one of the most memorable passages in English speech: 'Trust thyself. Accept the place which the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, confiding themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying a perception which was stirring in their hearts, working through their hands, dominating their whole being.' Arnold speaks of Carlyle's grim insistence upon labour and righteousness but of his scorn of happiness, and then says: 'But Emerson taught happiness in labour, in righteousness and veracity. In all the life of the spirit, happiness and eternal hope, that was Emerson's gospel. By his conviction that in the life of the spirit is happiness, by his hope and expectation that this life of the spirit will more and more be understood and will prevail, by this Emerson was great.'

Seven of Emerson's ancestors were ministers of New England churches. He inherited qualities of self-reliance, love of liberty, strenuous virtue, sincerity, sobriety and fearless loyalty to ideals. The form of his ideals was modified by the glow of transcendentalism which passed over parts of New England in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, but the spirit in which Emerson conceived the laws of life, reverenced them and lived them, was the Puritan spirit, only elevated, enlarged and beautified by the poetic temperament. Taking his degree from Harvard in 1821, despising school teaching, stirred by the passion for spiritual leadership, the ministry seemed to offer the fairest field for its satisfaction. In 1825 he entered the Divinity School in Harvard to prepare himself for the Unitarian ministry. In 1829 he became associate minister of the Second Unitarian Church in Boston. He arrived at the conviction that the Lord's Supper was not intended by Jesus to be a permanent sacrament. He found his congregation, not unnaturally, reluctant to agree with him. He therefore retired from the pastoral office. He was always a preacher, though of a singular order. His task was to befriend and guide the inner life of man. The influences of this period in his life have been enumerated as the liberating philosophy of Coleridge, the mystical vision of Swedenborg, the intimate poetry of Wordsworth, the stimulating essays of Carlyle. His address before the graduating class of the Divinity School at Cambridge in 1838 was an impassioned protest against what he called the defects of historical Christianity, its undue reliance upon the personal authority of Jesus, its failure to explore the moral nature of man. He made a daring plea for absolute self-reliance and new inspiration in religion: 'In the soul let redemption be sought. Refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men. Cast conformity behind you. Acquaint men at first hand with deity.' He never could have been the power he was by the force of his negations. His power lay in the wealth, the variety, the beauty and insight with which he set forth the positive side of his doctrine of the greatness of man, of the presence of God in man, of the divineness of life, of God's judgment and mercy in the order of the world. One sees both the power and the limitation of Emerson's religious teaching. At the root of it lay a real philosophy. He could not philosophise. He was always passing from the principle to its application. He could not systematise. He speaks of his 'formidable tendency to the lapidary style.' Granting that one finds his philosophy in fragments, just as one finds his interpretation of religion in flashes of marvellous insight, both are worth searching for, and either, in Coleridge's phrase, finds us, whether we search for it or not.

ARNOLD

What shall we say of Matthew Arnold himself? Without doubt the twenty years by which Arnold was Newman's junior at Oxford made a great difference in the intellectual atmosphere of that place, and of the English world of letters, at the time when Arnold's mind was maturing. He was not too late to feel the spell of Newman. His mind was hardly one to appreciate the whole force of that spell. He was at Oxford too early for the full understanding of the limits within which alone the scientific conception of the world can be said to be true. Arnold often boasted that he was no metaphysician. He really need never have mentioned the fact. The assumption that whatever is true can be verified in the sense of the precise kind of verification which science implies is a very serious mistake. Yet his whole intellectual strength was devoted to the sustaining, one cannot say exactly the cause of religion, but certainly that of noble conduct, and to the assertion of the elation of duty and the joy of righteousness. With all the scorn that Arnold pours upon the trust which we place in God's love, he yet holds to the conviction that 'the power without ourselves which makes for righteousness' is one upon which we may in rapture rely.

Arnold had convinced himself that in an ago such as ours, which will take nothing for granted, but must verify everything, Christianity, in the old form of authoritative belief in supernatural beings and miraculous events, is no longer tenable. We must confine ourselves to such ethical truths as can be verified by experience. We must reject everything which goes beyond these. Religion has no more to do with supernatural dogma than with metaphysical philosophy. It has nothing to do with either. It has to do with conduct. It is folly to make religion depend upon the conviction of the existence of an intelligent and moral governor of the universe, as the theologians have done. For the object of faith in the ethical sense Arnold coined the phrase: 'The Eternal not ourselves which makes for righteousness.' So soon as we go beyond this, we enter upon the region of fanciful anthropomorphism, of extra belief, _aberglaube_, which always revenges itself. These are the main contentions of his book, _Literature and Dogma_, 1875.

One feels the value of Arnold's recall to the sense of the literary character of the Scriptural documents, as urged in his book, _Saint Paul and Protestantism_, 1870, and again to the sense of the influence which the imagination of mankind has had upon religion. One feels the truth of his assertion of our ignorance. One feels Arnold's own deep earnestness. It was his concern that reason and the will of God should prevail. Though he was primarily a literary man, yet his great interest was in religion. One feels so sincerely that his main conclusion is sound, that it is the more trying that his statement of it should be often so perverse and his method of sustaining it so precarious. It is quite certain that the idea of the Eternal not ourselves which makes for righteousness is far from being the clear idea which Arnold claims. It is far from being an idea derived from experience or verifiable in experience, in the sense which he asserts. It seems positively incredible that Arnold did not know that with this conception he passed the boundary of the realm of science and entered the realm of metaphysics, which he so abhorred.

He was the eldest son of Thomas Arnold of Rugby. He was educated at Winchester and Rugby and at Balliol College. He was Professor of Poetry in Oxford from 1857 to 1867. He was an inspector of schools. The years of his best literary labour were much taken up in ways which were wasteful of his rare powers. He came by literary intuition to an idea of Scripture which others had built up from the point of view of a theory of knowledge and by investigation of the facts. He is the helpless personification of a view of the relation of science and religion which has absolutely passed away. Yet Arnold died only in 1888. How much a distinguished inheritance may mean is gathered from the fact that a grand-daughter of Thomas Arnold and niece of Matthew Arnold, Mrs. Humphry Ward, in her novels, has dealt largely with problems of religious life, and more particularly of religious thoughtfulness. She has done for her generation, in her measure, that which George Eliot did for hers.

MARTINEAU

As the chapter and the book draw to their close we can think of no man whose life more nearly spanned the century, or whose work touched more fruitfully almost every aspect of Christian thoughtfulness than did that of James Martineau. We can think of no man who gathered into himself more fully the significant theological tendencies of the age, or whose utterance entitles him to be listened to more reverently as seer and saint. He was born in 1805. He was bred as an engineer. He fulfilled for years the calling of minister and preacher. He gradually exchanged this for the activity of a professor. He was a religious philosopher in the old sense, but he was also a critic and historian. His position with reference to the New Testament was partly antiquated before his _Seat of Authority in Religion_, 1890, made its appearance. Evolutionism never became with him a coherent and consistent assumption. Ethics never altogether got rid of the innate ideas. The social movement left him almost untouched. Yet, despite all this, he was in some sense a representative progressive theologian of the century.

There is a parallel between Newman and Martineau. Both busied themselves with the problem of authority. Criticism had been fatal to the apprehension which both had inherited concerning the authority of Scripture. From that point onward they took divergent courses. The arguments which touched the infallible and oracular authority of Scripture, for Newman established that of the Church; for Martineau they had destroyed that of the Church four hundred years ago. Martineau's sense, even of the authority of Jesus, reverent as it is, is yet no pietistic and mystical view. The authority of Jesus is that of the truth which he speaks, of the goodness which dwells in him, of God himself and God alone. A real interest in the sciences and true learning in some of them made Martineau able to write that wonderful chapter in his _Seat of Authority_, which he entitled 'God in Nature.' Newman could see in nature, at most a sacramental suggestion, a symbol of transcendental truth.

The Martineaus came of old Huguenot stock, which in England belonged to the liberal Presbyterianism out of which much of British Unitarianism came. The righteousness of a persecuted race had left an austere impress upon their domestic and social life. Intellectually they inherited the advanced liberalism of their day. Harriet Martineau's earlier piety had been of the most fervent sort. She reacted violently against it in later years. She had little of the politic temper and gentleness of her brother. She described one of her own later works as the last word of philosophic atheism. James was, and always remained, of deepest sensitiveness and reverence and of a gentleness which stood in high contrast with his powers of conflict, if necessity arose. Out of Martineau's years as preacher in Liverpool and London came two books of rare devotional quality, _Endeavours after the Christian Life_, 1843 and 1847, and _Hours of Thought on Sacred Things_, 1873 and 1879. Almost all his life he was identified with Manchester College, as a student when the college was located at York, as a teacher when it returned to Manchester and again when it was removed to London. With its removal to Oxford, accomplished in 1889, he had not fully sympathised. He believed that the university itself must some day do justice to the education of men for the ministry in other churches than the Anglican. He was eighty years old when he published his _Types of Ethical Theory_, eighty-two when he gave to the world his _Study of Religion_, eighty-five when his _Seat of Authority_ saw the light. The effect of this postponement of publication was not wholly good. The books represented marvellous learning and ripeness of reflection. But they belong to a period anterior to the dates they bear upon their title-pages. Martineau's education and his early professional experience put him in touch with the advancing sciences. In the days when most men of progressive spirit were carried off their feet, when materialism was flaunted in men's faces and the defence of religion was largely in the hands of those who knew nothing of the sciences, Martineau was not moved. He saw the end from the beginning. There is nothing finer in his latest work than his early essays--'Nature and God,' 'Science, Nescience and Faith,' and 'Religion as affected by Modern Materialism.' He died in 1900 in his ninety-fifth year.

It is difficult to speak of the living in these pages. Personal relations enforce reserve and brevity. Nevertheless, no one can think of Manchester College and Martineau without being reminded of Mansfield College and of Fairbairn, a Scotchman, but of the Independent Church. He also was both teacher and preacher all his days, leader of the movement which brought Mansfield College from Birmingham to Oxford, by the confession both of Anglicans and of Non-conformists the most learned man in his subjects in the Oxford of his time, an historian, touched by the social enthusiasm, but a religious philosopher, _par excellence_. His _Religion and Modern Life_, 1894, his _Catholicism, Roman and Anglican_, 1899, his _Place of Christ in Modern Theology_, 1893, his _Philosophy of the Christian Religion_, 1902, and his _Studies in Religion and Theology_, 1910, indicate the wideness of his sympathies and the scope of the application, of his powers. If imitation is homage, grateful acknowledgment is here made of rich spoil taken from his books.

Philosophy took a new turn in Britain after the middle of the decade of the sixties. It began to be conceded that Locke and Hume were dead. Had Mill really appreciated that fact he might have been a philosopher more fruitful and influential than he was. Sir William Hamilton was dead. Mansel's endeavour, out of agnosticism to conjure the most absurdly positivistic faith, had left thinking men more exposed to scepticism, if possible, than they had been before. When Hegel was thought in Germany to be obsolete, and everywhere the cry was 'back to Kant,' some Scotch and English scholars, the two Cairds and Seth Pringle-Pattison, with Thomas Hill Green, made a modified Hegelianism current in Great Britain. They led by this path in the introduction of their countrymen to later German idealism. By this introduction philosophy in both Britain and America has greatly gained. Despite these facts, John Caird's _Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion_, 1880, is still only a religious philosophy. It is not a philosophy of religion. His _Fundamental Ideas of Christianity_, 1896, hardly escapes the old antitheses among which theological discussion moved, say, thirty years ago. Edward Caird's _Critical Philosophy of Kant_, 1889, and especially his _Evolution of Religion_, 1892, marked the coming change more definitely than did any of the labours of his brother. Thomas Hill Green gave great promise in his _Introduction to Hume_, 1885, his _Prolegomena to Ethics_, 1883, and still more in essays and papers scattered through the volumes edited by Nettleship after Green's death. His contribution to religious discussion was such as to make his untimely end to be deeply deplored. Seth Pringle-Pattison's early work, _The Development from Kant to Hegel_, 1881, still has great worth. His _Hegelianism and Personality_, 1893, deals with one aspect of the topic which needs ever again to be explored, because of the psychological basis which in religious discussion is now assumed.

JAMES

The greatest contribution of America to religious discussion in recent years is surely William James's _Varieties of Religious Experience_, 1902. The book is unreservedly acknowledged in Britain, and in Germany as well, to be the best which we yet have upon the psychology of religion. Not only so, it gives a new intimation as to what psychology of religion means. It blazes a path along which investigators are eagerly following. Boyce, in his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in 1911, declared James to be the third representative philosopher whom America has produced. He had the form of philosophy as Emerson never had. He could realise whither he was going, as Emerson in his intuitiveness never did. He criticised the dominant monism in most pregnant way. He recurred to the problems which dualism owned but could not solve. We cannot call the new scheme dualism. The world does not go back. Yet James made an over-confident generation feel that the centuries to which dualism had seemed reasonable were not so completely without intelligence as has been supposed by some. No philosophy may claim completeness as an interpretation of the universe. No more conclusive proof of this judgment could be asked than is given quite unintentionally in Haeckel's _Weltrãthsel_.

At no point is this recall more earnest than in James's dealing with the antithesis of good and evil. The reaction of the mind of the race, and primarily of individuals, upon the fact of evil, men's consciousness of evil in themselves, their desire to be rid of it, their belief that there is a deliverance from it and that they have found that deliverance, is for James the point of departure for the study of the actual phenomena and the active principle of religion. The truest psychological and philosophical instinct of the ago thus sets the experience of conversion in the centre of discussion. Apparently most men have, at some time and in some way, the consciousness of a capacity for God which is unfulfilled, of a relation to God unrealised, which is broken and resumed, or yet to be resumed. They have the sense that their own effort must contribute to this recovery. They have the sense also that something without themselves empowers them to attempt this recovery and to persevere in the attempt. The psychology of religion is thus put in the forefront. The vast masses of material of this sort which the religious world, both past and present, possesses, have been either actually unexplored, or else set forth in ways which distorted and obscured the facts. The experience is the fact. The best science the world knows is now to deal with it as it would deal with any other fact. This is the epoch-making thing, the contribution to method in James's book. James was born in New York in 1842, the son of a Swedenborgian theologian. He took his medical degree at Harvard in 1870. He began to lecture there in anatomy in 1872 and became Professor of Philosophy in 1885. He was a Gifford and a Hibbert Lecturer. He died in 1910.